HEELZ

Operations and Information Management



Operations and Information Management

Introduction

This assignment covers in detail the case of Heelz boutique. Before progressing further with the mentioning of the different aspects covered in this paper, it is pertinent to introduce the main case of this assignment. Heelz is a boutique shoe retailer owned by Sally, who established this business from a single shop in England. Within a short passage of time, the shop had grown from one to eight. Out of these four shops had been planned and created from scratch, however it was just recently in July'12 that as part of expanding her business, Sally acquired another four outlet group called 'Zapatos'. Sally intends to rename this chain under her own brand name of Heelz.

In addition, to her new acquisition Sally has also acquired two outlets of Zapatos in Spain, which has gained her to launch and establish her brand name in the international European market, outside England. With these acquisitions, new business needs have arisen, such as opening of new warehouse in South England, introducing ecommerce to her business, to capitalize on the growth of her business further. Both the businesses use different IT systems and function, other than the merging of a mutual system structure, the business also needs to incorporate Business to Consumers (B2C) ecommerce functionality as well.

Apart from this, other key business issues confronting Sally include elements of globalization, organizational issues related to merging, legacy systems, choosing the open source software, and aligning of the business processes. Since, all of these issues are vital yet extensive to be individually reviewed, thus, this assignment will focus upon the incorporation of ecommerce in the expanding business of the Sally. This will be discussed in great length in the upcoming sections.

Discussion

It is imperative to discuss what ecommerce is, before progressing further with the discussion about its relevance to our case.

Ecommerce

First emerged in the year 1994 (Lorette, n.d), Ecommerce is a term that stands for 'Electronic Commerce', where commerce is reflective of the types or different nature of business activities and transactions. These transactions if transferred over a virtual connection such as across the internet then this specific exchange of information is called an ecommerce activity (www.networksolutions.com/).

Conversely, another source defines ecommerce as the selling and buying of various goods and services through the internet, mostly through business websites. Relatively, this term is also known through different names such as 'e-business', and due its increasing use in the retailing sector, it has also have become to be known as 'e-tailing' (www. searchcio.techtarget.com/).

Similarly, another source describes ecommerce as means of conducting financial or capital related transactions electronically. Due to its many components, ecommerce rapidly became popular amongst the increasing number of internet users, who were intrigued by the innovative technology of ordering physical goods through the internet (www.straight-on.com/).

Types of Ecommerce

Ecommerce can be classified into various groups catering to different set of business stakeholders. This includes Business-to-Business ecommerce, popularly known as B2B signifies supply chain technology that deals with electronic transactions amongst different ...